Dear Elder Oaks

You don’t know me. You will never meet me. But you, and the church that you help lead and shape policy for, has been a huge part of my life and will continue to be so, even though I am no longer active.

You see, the Mormon church is the reason I got married at the tender age of 20 years old. I was promised that if I got married in the temple and if I abstained from sex before marriage that I could be married to any good man and be happy.

I married an amazing man. A man who was better than good. A man who was my best friend. One who made me laugh and wiped away my tears and who held my hand when I was going though some of the hardest decisions of my young life. This man also was gay. He told me this after 8 years of marriage.

We grappled, Elder Oaks, with what this meant for our marriage. If you are to believe him, he didn’t even realize he was gay until years after we were married, and by then he loved me so much that he didn’t want to hurt me. But if you want my take on it, he was so terrified of what being gay meant when he grew up Mormon, he ignored it and shoved his sexuality into a box which he left in the furthest corners of his mind so that he could marry me and be happy in our marriage.

There is a funny thing about boxes, Elder Oaks. They are meant to be opened. And so, after almost 9 years of being married to his best friend, he realized that not only was lying to me cruel to me, since I couldn’t understand why our sex drives were so different and getting turned down by your husband is pretty humiliating (I mean, probably TMI but the sex we did have was great! Which just goes to show that sexuality is really confusing and not black and white.) but it was also cruel to him – because he was engaging in a sexual relationship that he had almost zero attraction to, other than the carnal feelings that come with any type of sexual stimulation. It wasn’t sustainable. It wasn’t fair to either of us. It gave me huge trust issues and even bigger body image issues. And so we got divorced.

I want to talk to you about some of the stuff you said on Saturday that is a huge part of the reason I am 30 years old with my entire future ripped from me. I’m not going to entirely blame the church, as my ex-husband bore the responsibly of his own lie, but he has also been culpable to me for it. I don’t see the church ever admitting that their policies played a damning part in the dissolution of a marriage and the completely messed up and painful results of how it happened.

“Those who do not believe in or aspire to exaltation and are most persuaded by the ways of the world consider this Family Proclamation as just a statement of policy that should be changed. In contrast, Latter-day Saints affirm that the Family Proclamation defines the nature of family relationships where the most important part of our eternal development can occur.”

There are so many things wrong with this statement. First off, assuming that people in a same sex marriage or in any type of committed relationship aren’t aspiring to or believing in exaltation is total and complete hogwash. It is this type of garbage thinking that caused a good friend to proselyte to me mere hours after I announced my divorce instead of simply being there for me in the hardest time of my life. There is a quote by Amy Pohler from her book Yes, Please – it is “Good for you! Not for me.” There is a song lyric by The Rocket Summer that says “What’s right for me, might be not right for you.” Both of these statements are, in my mind, the ultimate way to allow others to use their agency in a way that shows integrity in their actions and thoughts. If we allow others to believe differently than us, and if we ourselves believe that they are doing it because they really think it is best, then we will begin to have respect for those who have different viewpoints than our own. When the church assumes it is the only way to salvation or exaltation, it is literally taking away the possibility that people can be happy without the church, which is so asinine it is one of the reason people outside the church think it is a cult. #realtalk

Also, there are MANY latter-day Saints that are active and true believers that take issue with the Family Proclamation. To say what you said is to say that if you disagree with the Family Proclamation you aren’t even Mormon. Elder Oaks, I beg you to look at what that does to people in the church. If we aren’t allowed to disagree with things, we don’t feel welcome and stop coming. I know because it is why I no longer felt comfortable going to church. Does the church really need to lose members right now? We both know that the conversion rate is the lowest it has been in decades, despite the growing missionary force. Why alienate your own members for thinking differently? Wouldn’t it be better to find a way to be inclusive and loving to all your members? What would Jesus do?

“The Family Proclamation begins by declaring ‘that marriage between a man and a woman is ordained of God and that the family is central to the Creator’s plan for the eternal destiny of His children. It also affirms that ‘gender is an essential characteristic of individual premortal, mortal, and eternal identity and purpose.’ It further declares that God has commanded that ‘the sacred powers of procreation are to be employed only between man and woman, lawfully wedded as husband and wife.'”

I mean, I’m sure you have heard the reasons why people have issues with this section of the Family Proclamation so I’m not going to fully go into it here, but I want to touch on for a moment how gender roles can be so incredibly damaging to a smart, ambitious young woman. Elder Oaks, I was going places. I was smart and engaging and probably could have taken over the world (and still might, now that my head is screwed on right again) but in my youth I was taught, overtly and subliminally, that my place was in the home. That there was no greater joy or calling than being a Wife and a Mother. Being a working mother was frowned upon, and being a career woman was even less acceptable. I heard stories and comments my whole youth about how working basically meant you were neglecting your children. I was taught that my body needed to be covered because I was a temptation and that my body was solely for a man’s pleasure. I was never once advised on a sexual relationship being based on reciprocity – that my own pleasure is just as important as that of a man’s. I was taught that I needed to learn to fold fitted sheets and clean a house instead of learning how to tie knots or survive in the woods. (the latter of which of which would actually be way more applicable to my daily life now than the former) I know that you are doing a better job as a church of not being so divided in gender – the new Youth Activity guide on lds.org is sooooo much better than what we had 15 years ago – but you cannot deny that these basic tenants of what a woman SHOULD be vs what a man SHOULD be are still taught every Sunday and Wednesday to impressionable youth everywhere. I was so caught up in the narrative that my job, when I got married, was to sustain and support my husband that I quit school and worked so that he wouldn’t have to worry about money on top of stressing about school. This isn’t an uncommon occurrence at BYU, just so you know. I put my husband first in every way and he was supposed to provide for me in return. Well, he will finish grad school next year and make upper six figures while I try to figure out what I want to do with my life now that I don’t have that support I was supposed to. All because he was gay. Which he didn’t feel he could be, since the LDS church LITERALLY TELLS HIM HE CAN’T BE.

I swear on everything holy if anyone tries to say that you can BE gay you just can’t ACT on it I will find you and punch you directly in the mouth. My entire 20’s are GONE because of this line of thinking. Because he can’t act on being gay (which, um, is called being gay, you idiots) of course he should marry me. OF COURSE HE SHOULD TRY TO LIVE OUT THE GENDER ROLE HE WAS TAUGHT HIS WHOLE LIFE HE SHOULD. Why tell me that maybe he had feelings for men? Or thought men were more attractive than women? BECAUSE HE COULDN’T EVER ACT ON THEM ANYWAYS OR HE WOULDN’T GET TO BE WITH HIS FAMILY FOREVER. /rantover

I get where you are going with the procreation before marriage thing, but that is also to blame for my situation. BUT here is the good news: If you freaking stop saying “between a man and a woman”, the main issue that caused my divorce wouldn’t be a thing anymore. I respect that you think sex is sacred and that it should only happen in committed, monogamous relationships (which you consider marriage). But the good news is now that Gay marriage is FINALLY legal, you can stop excluding a good portion of your membership from ever being able to find true love and sexual satisfaction in a marital relationship. If you don’t think that saying people who have attraction to the same sex either need to stay celibate or be in relationships that have a lower rate of happiness and life satisfaction than people with Lupus enjoy (I can get you this study, although I know you have already seen it) is cruel and horrible, then you have zero business leading a church that claims to be centered in Christ.

“We participate and even excel in many worldly activities, but on some subjects we forgo participation as we seek to follow the teachings of Jesus Christ and His apostles.”

This is the same problem as the first- just because someone participates in different activities than you, even ones that you consider worldly, doesn’t mean that they don’t follow Jesus. I know plenty of people who are consistently more Christ like and eschew more Christian values than any Mormons I know who drink coffee, who drink, who have premarital sex and who don’t follow traditional gender roles. I even know non-religious people who serve their world community with greater effect than most of my Mormon friends. Once again, the way to sound like a cult is to act like your organization is the only way to be happy – when we all know that this is a huge falsehood.

Well, Elder Oaks, I’m sure nothing I say will change your mind but I just felt like I needed to get this out there. I felt like people need to know, especially people in my life, that the type of stuff you said this weekend is more than just words said over a pulpit. To young impressionable people, it is a guidepost to how to live your life, even if you are a square peg who cannot fit into a round hole. You either have to whittle away your edges and become something you aren’t, you shouldn’t ever be, which ends is disaster when you are put under the pressure of real life (turns out, whittling makes a peg weaker) or you ram helplessly up against it until the pain of trying to fit into something you cannot becomes too much. There is no happy ending for me in this, other than the beauty in getting to start over, which is filled with more pain than most people will ever know. There is no happy ending for my ex-husband, other than getting to fully accept himself. We have to deal with our new reality of having 10 years of our life stolen from us to be in a relationship that did not serve either of us in the end because we thought we were doing what we were supposed to, what we were taught to do, instead of doing what we knew was right for us. We have to deal with the fact that being friends is more painful that I can handle at the moment and may always be – meaning not only did we lose each other as spouses, which is tragic, but we lost each other as best friends which is devastating and agonizing to a degree that I’m not sure I will ever be able to explain in words.

I hope that if you do read this, you will know that your words have consequences, wether you intend them to or not. I haven’t even talked about the suicide rate among LGBTQIA LDS youth, but you seem not to care as the spike in deaths the last time this type of bigotry was spoken over the pulpit in General Conference didn’t cause you to change. Please, please, please, focus on one of the million other topics that are more relevant to Christanity and less harmful to people if you can’t be loving and accepting. Vow to do no more harm if you can’t reverse what you have already done, instead of infecting more over and over again. Your words have consequences, and in this case it was my entire world. You will have to answer for that at some point, even if it isn’t now.

Sabrina